Bush fails environment, activists say

$2.2 billion in budget cuts ignore people's will, LCV says

By

WillPollock

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- An environmental activist group has a $2.2 billion bone to pick with the president.

In an assessment released Tuesday, the League of Conservation Voters said President Bush's "hands off" environmental attitude has led to $2.2 billion in budget cuts that ignore the American public's concern for the environment.

In the meanwhile, senators moved on several fronts to attack an energy shortage by approving a reform of utility corporate law and seeking to put a cap on electricity rates in California this summer. See full story.

"Despite the last-minute flurry of environmental actions coming out of the White House and Cabinet last week ... this administration has failed to embrace and promote the decidedly pro-environment sentiment of the vast majority of Americans," said Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters.

"President Bush's critics predicted that he would bring the same failed, hands-off environmental approach he pursued in the Texas he pursued in the Texas capital to the nation's capital," she said. "So far, they've been right." See the group's report.

Callahan said the administration's policies on delayed arsenic restrictions in drinking water, the proposed rollback of hard-rock mining regulations and pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol shows how Bush caters to energy special-interest groups.

The president's "environmental positions represent little more than a payback to the oil, gas, mining and logging interests that invested in his campaign," she said. "[This will be] a political calculation that is sure to backfire both legislatively and electorally."

The administration has seen its own share of environmental backfires. On Monday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman was operating under "confusion" when she said over the weekend that the Bush administration would not advocate drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Read what she said.

Callahan said her group sees Whitman as one of the environment's "better friends" in the administration. But she added that the mixed policy message could "undercut her credibility inside [and outside] the administration."

While Callahan did praise some of Bush's environmental efforts --including support for brownfields clean-up and increased funding for land and water conservation -- she said his overall low grade could cost him politically.

"He has failed the American people on the most basic concerns for clean air, safe water and protected public lands," she said. "The price Bush pays for his anti-environment assaults during these first 100 days may well be his party's control of Congress in 2002."

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